Remember the Hand

Remember the Hand studies a group of manuscript books made in the Christian monasteries of northern Iberia in the tenth and eleventh centuries. These richly illuminated codices share an urgent sense of scribal presence. The scribes name themselves, describe themselves and even paint their own portraits. Marginal notes are common in medieval manuscripts, but scribes rarely make themselves so fully known.

These scribes speak directly to the reader, asking for prayers of intercession and sharing something of themselves. They invite the reader to acknowledge the labor of writing and also to theorize it, comparing it to agricultural work or textile production, to tending a garden of knowledge or weaving a text out of words.

The corpus of articulate codices is known to a school of Iberian codicologists but has hardly been studied beyond that community. Catherine Brown draws on it to recover the scribes' understanding of reading as an intimate and powerful encounter among many parties: authors and their text, scribes and their pen, patrons and their art-object, and readers and the words and images before them. The book itself mediates all of these encounters.

By making that mediation visible and recalling the labor that comes before it, the scribes reach across time with a simple message: remember the hand. The book is available open access from the publisher.